I have (several) times in my life lost data, which is a sterile, emotionless way of saying I’ve lost photos, documents, music, and contact information that I could never recover or replace. Over the last several years I have started putting systems in place to preventing this from happening again.

Part of the impetus for this article is that I not only wanted to go through all of my backups, but I wanted to document them, so I could refer to them later if I needed to. I hope all the thinking and documenting I’ve gone into here will help other people generate their own backup plans.